Zara - is this the shape women should aspire to be?

[TanyaTonyaMargaret]

I was just looking for a dress for my teen dd for Christmas. I looked on Zara www.zara.com/uk/en/sequin-dress-p00387169.html?v1=7386534&v2=1074622.

My dd is average (size 8) and has what my mother would refer to as a ‘good bust’. She’s a similar shape to most of her friends. It’s almost impossible to gauge whether these clothes would look good on her. I have lots of ‘slim’ friends but don’t know anyone who looks even remotely the shape of these women. I know four women who are 6 ft but they don’t look anything like this shape either. To be fair to Zara I then looked at their male clothing to see what their models were like. They were fairly slim but not like the women. I’m not saying they need to use overweight people but just vaguely average would be great.

Hopefully it’s just Zara and I am about to be delighted by what I find on other retailer’s sites. Fingers crossed.

@BlancheM
‘I think you should examine why you think your DD is an 'average' size 8 (10 years ago this was considered tiny) before making statements about what should be considered normal tbh’

I’m not sure what you mean by this? If you are saying she’s too thin then have a read of the masses of research about how clothes sizing has changed over the years. If you are saying she is too heavy than I will be compelled to come and poke you with a very sharp stick. Whatever this thread has been, no-one else has been making nasty personal comments.

‘Normal’ comes in all shapes and sizes. If it was done by percentages that model would represent - at a guess - about 5% of the population. So why is she (not her personally) the industry standard?

The model looks lovely and healthy.
The dress is pretty hideous but hey ho.

Yes, women should aspire to be fit and healthy. Normal weight is a good thing to aspire to before anyone jumps in with anorexia comments.

Agree that body diversity would be a great thing to see. Women can be at a healthy weight and have very different frames and it'd be nice if it were reflected in promo shots.

As a skinny teen, I compared myself to curvy celebs and models and felt inferior. Should we not have busty underwear models in case it offends flat chested, skinny girls.
You also can’t compare this slim, young model to your 6ft friends who I presume are much older?
She’s a model, she is not meant to represent all young girls. She just looks good in clothes. That’s her job.

Zara fits my tall, very slim DD and is one of the few places I can buy jeans that actually fit her.
She eats loads so no eating disorder (despite the school ringing me as they were worried).
I was the same at her age (but not quite so tall). However, I get your point as she is definitely slimmer and taller than most of her fiends

www.joyscribe.com/pretty-little-thing-now-showing-outfits-on-two-size-models/

Saw this earlier today.

That's great ohbabybabybabyoh - they just need someone in the middle of the scale and that would be so much more useful.

CityLivingWithDogs - I agree we can't see a model to represent every body type for every item of clothing. However the industry standard of models should, in my opinion, reflect a more average person rather than the extremes of height, weight and bust (or lack of) which the industry standard is.

OP, take a look at JCrew. They are trying to do the very thing you’re talking about, although only on a few items at the moment. Hopefully they can role it out in the future.
www.jcrew.com/uk/p/womens_category/pants/slim/cameron-pant-in-ponte/J8065?color_name=heather-coal

You can see the trousers on 3 different sized models.

To be honest though, how you describe your daughter and how she’s very similar to her peers, don’t you think that’s more important than looking like a model? I always think being average weight and height brings its benefits.
For example a tall skinny girl in the real world, often can’t even find clothes to fit them. The 6ft women has very few places they can shop. Manufacturers make for the majority. Trust me, being different from your peers is much harder than being ‘average’ and not looking like a Zara model.

What strikes me about that model isn't so much that she's thin but that she also has boobs. Is this a common shape for young women now?
I don't have daughters so I may just be out of the loop but I was probably as thin as that model (and perfectly healthy) when I was a teenager but I was also totally flat chested and so were all my friends who were thin.

In terms of the title of this thread, I think women should 'aspire' to be whatever shape they naturally are when they are healthy - and this encompasses a wide range. I've been heartened of late seeing some companies with a wider range of body shapes as models (recently bought from modibodi and they have a great range of body shapes on display though they could do with a few older models too). Aspiring to be anything other than something in the realms of reality will only end in misery.

I'm short, I can't 'aspire' to be tall. I've also had two c-sections and I think only costly and invasive surgeries would get back the tummy of my pre-kid days but I don't care. I love my tum, it bears witness to having produced two beautiful actual humans! How amazing is that?

Tanya what on earth...I can't get my head around your response to my post.
I was pointing out the absurdity of you using the word 'average' for your slim DD (not 'normal', 'average') whilst starting a thread to shame a model for being too thin, who is ironically, probably the same clothes size (an 8).

Anyway my point was, the brands are trying to flog clothes which is why they use fashion models: extremely tall with a certain bone structure (which gives the body shape, not the size), so we can all see how the clothes hang. If they used a mix of body shapes and sizes, the clothes wouldn't give a general look of the garment, and as fast fashion isn't tailored or particularly well made, won't look as good and therefore they'd get less orders.

To be fair to Zara it is a European brand - Spanish. You only have to look at southern European females and their shape is very different to us Northern Europeans. Their hips and boobs are generally smaller.

Perhaps look at the models of top shop or M&S to do a true comparison.

Totally agree with OP that Pretty Little Thing needs a model who is right in the middle of healthy BMI not one under it and one over it.

@TanyaTonyaMargaret definitely. One shop I love for this is Selfish Mother/the family store (I never quite know which it goes by!) where rather than using models they post photos of an assortment of real people wearing their sweatshirts on sale with the size that person is wearing and their usual clothing size so you can see how they fit on someone the same size as yourself. Such a great idea I think.

Just looked at Selfish Mother - that is ace.

Shein online store does this too. that's how I know some of their stuff will work on me. They are dirt cheap but I get so many compliments for their clothes because I buy things that short chubby women look good in on their website.

Parkrun manage to use size 8+ models and they look lovely.

In all the hysteria about skinny models it might be worth remembering that all current dress sizes have been hugely inflated.

This is obvious if you look at vintage clothes from the 40s or 50s. A size 12 or 14 from that period is smaller than a size 8 now. I have dresses and skirts from the mid 90s which I have kept because they are beautiful, timeless pieces. They are 8s and 10s and they are much smaller than what passes for an 8 or a 10 now.

I'm so disheartened by this thread. All this talk about what does and doesn't 'look good' on different sizes and shapes of body. I feel I've stepped back into the 1950's. Can't women just wear what they like?
TanyaTonya, if you think your daughter will like the dress, buy it for her and tell her she looks beautiful (and that she's beautiful whatever she's wearing).

Electric monkey that model is not seriously overweight. Yes she is bigger than a size 8 ( I was being sarcastic because most models are a smaller than an 8).

“Overweight” people can wear sports clothes you know. Not all of us runners are lean and slight.

That model is overweight.

Can't women just wear what they like?

They can, and they should. But there's a difference between an item of clothing that fits your body without gaping or pulling in awkward places, and one which clearly does not fit. That's what's so annoying about a one-size fits all approach (driven by a combination of "it's easier to get it to fit on a straight-up-and-down body type" and economics - "women might want sleeves but we don't want to give them to them because sleeves cost money"). The end result of this is clothes women don't feel happy or comfortable in. This has little or nothing to do with a 1950s "think about what suits your body" vibe (though actually, there's nothing wrong with being interested in fashion, and many of us do accept that what suits one woman won't necessarily suit another), and a lot more to do with accepting that women's body shapes do vary, and women should be able to get clothes that actually fit them.

Shops sell clothes in a wider range of lengths and sizes than ever before.

Not every style of clothing is going to fit everyone properly. It’s like being annoyed that every chest of drawers ever madedoesn’t fit into an alcove in your bedroom.